


Truth and Trust

by drinkbloodlikewine



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Conversations, Gen, M/M, Missing Coats, Post-Finale, Regret, Scars, Will Graham Helps Himself, Wine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-13
Updated: 2014-09-13
Packaged: 2018-02-15 14:23:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2232285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drinkbloodlikewine/pseuds/drinkbloodlikewine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><b>PROMPT:</b> Post-S2. Will finally finds Hannibal, or the other way round, but Will is no more ill or on the verge of a nervous breakdown. So they can sit by the fireplace, have a glass of wine and discuss their complicated relationship, their feelings of each other, etc. Socialize like adults.</p><p>Just a calm, relaxed conversation before they decide who kills who.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Truth and Trust

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the [Hannibal Artist Collective Charity Auction](http://hannibal-acca.tumblr.com/) \- they have permission to post this work anywhere they'd like!
> 
> Interested in getting Hannibal fics or fanart in exchange for helping puppies? [Here's how you can find out more](http://www.gofundme.com/9hqvpc)!

“You look well.”

Will can’t resist the note of laughter that lifts his sigh. “In spite of -”

“In spite of,” Hannibal agrees simply.

With a terse smile, Will takes in the breadth of the room in which they stand. Travertine tile and high ceilings, an array of antique amphorae and ancient art set into shallow alcoves, in a room far too large for one who seems so entirely alone.

And he is, Will reminds himself.

They both are.

It’s cold here, despite the moderate Mediterranean winter, not outside but in this house in particular. Will feels it sink into his skin as he stands, an icy lifelessness in the space around him. He doesn’t need to ask, then, why the fireplace is alight as it plays stark against the shining floors, nor wonder why he gets a chill despite it.

“Do you have it?”

Hannibal slows the pour of wine from the slender decanter to regard him.

“My coat,” Will answers, and as he sits, he runs his hands along his thighs, a nervous gesture to smooth out the expensive fabric, tailored for this particular occasion. The entire outfit - steel grey button-down and dark slacks, shoes shined enough to reflect the firelight - had been a whim as he waited for a response after sending a note to Hannibal by way of the local museum council in which the older man had been spending his time.

Little more to do than wait, he thought Hannibal might appreciate the gesture, dressed as he is - predictably - in a suit tailored to pinpoint precision. From the look that lit his eyes, Will knows it had its intended effect, choosing to attribute it to the suit rather than to the sight of Will himself.

“Yes,” Hannibal finally answers. He sets aside the decanter to gather both glasses and offer one to Will first before settling into the chair across from him. A smile touches the corners of his eyes, not yet his mouth, as Hannibal lifts his glass. “To reunions, then - you and your coat.”

“You and I,” Will adds, before taking a sip. He sucks his lower lip into his mouth in thought and to draw the taste of tannins from it, watching the fire now, rather than the focused attention of the man across from him.

A year and some, since they last stood across from each other. Longer still since they sat with wine and spoke. As friends, as partners, as a doctor and patient, it was never particularly clear. Lines as uneven as the scar that severed them, as the words shared and unshared that ripped their whole into halves, and their separate halves into quarters.

A year and some, of stitches shredded in body and mind, healing despite Will’s every inclination to continue tearing at them until all that lay inside him was finally released. What they never told him, all the doctors and all the psychiatrists and all the counselors sent to try and make him whole again, what they never told him was that the recovery is harder still than even the injuries themselves. Nerves stinging sharp as they string themselves back together, pulling taut when he moved or turned or tried to just live. Memories quick as the blade slicing deep across his thoughts, when he heard a particular song or ate a particular food or found the scarlet sweater, still tossed across his chair where it was left the last time they -

“Are you, in fact, well? Appearances are often deceiving.”

He doesn’t fight the faint smile that appears, but hides it behind his hand instead, rubbing thoughtful across his mouth.

“Better than I ought to be,” Will admits. “I’m sure you saw Lounds’ picture.”

“I did not need to, having been present for the moment itself,” responds Hannibal with something like humor, very distant, and very dark. “But yes, it was hard to avoid them.”

Will breathes a note of amusement.

“Do you dream much, Will?”

“As rarely as one could hope. Do you?”

“I have little need,” Hannibal murmurs into his glass, sliding one leg across the other as he reclines into his chair.

Will’s faint smile grows fainter still, fading entirely as he drums his fingers across the glass. He wonders at the cost of it - the wine, the glass, the tile beneath it, the seat beneath him, the house and Hannibal, sitting neatly. It has taken far more than money, for this to be as it is now, left behind debts that can never be entirely repaid.

“You seem comfortable,” Will acknowledges. Bitterness, seeping past the sweetness of wine on his lips.

“We might have both been, here, long before now, and with far less pain trailing like entrails behind us,” Hannibal remarks, with a sharpness of tone that registers to Will as new, and very raw. “Together.”

“You asked me,” acknowledges Will.

“Yes. I gave you an opportunity -”

“Yes.”

“Several. To simply tell the truth.”

“Yes.”

“- and you did not take it. Even until the end.”

Will tilts his head in a bare shake, hand finding its way to rest across his stomach, and then moving it to the arm of the chair instead.

“No.”

The firelight catches the movement of Hannibal’s jaw, a shift of tension, but eased when he sips his wine again.

“Why?”

Leaning forward, Will rests his elbows on his knees, glass between both hands and a pain digging low into his stomach. Warmth, spreading, of blood and of longing. He lets it drip across his fingers, and soak into the tile beneath them before finally answering.

“Your life dismantles,” Will considers, brows furrowed. “Brick by brick, you could move it, content enough to hold in your thoughts what once was. Mine has never been so tidy. Cobbled together uneven and mismatched, not bricks but clapboard and cement and wood and plaster. It doesn’t move, not so quickly, and when you asked -”

“For the truth.”

Will meets his eyes, tastes the frustration bitter between them when he presses his tongue against his lips. “And when you asked how could I know? What - what reason, even now, to think that you wouldn’t respond with -”

“Trust,” Hannibal snaps, a soft hiss in his words, a cobra’s feint. “I would have forgiven you.”

“Like you did, then? In the kitchen, Hannibal, was that,” Will nearly laughs, pushing a hand back through his hair. “Was that forgiveness?”

“It was a devastation,” Hannibal responds. “A punishment. You lied to me - every opportunity -”

“And Abigail,” interjects Will quietly, forcing his voice to steady as he says her name, the number of times of which he’s done in the last year able to be counted on one hand. “Did she lie to you, too?”

Will watches as Hannibal’s fingers tense against his glass, and the man finally averts his sharp attention from Will towards the fire instead.

“That was a mistake.”

“A punishment.”

“For me.”

“Yes.”

Settling back in his chair, Will allows himself to sigh, hoping Hannibal doesn’t hear the tremor in his breath, see the way his fingers tremble as he pushes them beneath his glasses and against his eyes.

“And if I had said - if I had agreed. If I had told you about it all, Freddie and Jack and -”

Now Hannibal swallows, a bare movement that Will notices as much as he notices the tension in the older man’s eyes, the lines that have worked deeper into his skin in the time that’s passed, the toll as transparent to Will as the scar Will carries in exchange.

“I would have forgiven you,” breathes Hannibal, and the pain in his words twists Will’s heart so hard he feels like the vessels are being torn from their moorings.

“You didn’t.”

“Not then. It was too late, Will, what choice was left but to clean up what was left?”

“Lives were left,” Will laughs, softly, pushing a hand through his hair. Disbelief, in the absurdity of Hannibal’s words - the dismissal of so much and the idea that, had Will spoken in truth -

“An unfortunate circumstance.” Hannibal’s words are cold as the air in the cavernous room around them. “Collateral damage.”

“And you want to tell me - you want me to believe - that you would have forgiven me.”

“Yes. We might have fixed things, then. There was time enough. We could have left, with no trail behind us and Abigail -”

“Don’t,” Will interjects, and he forces himself to draw a breath. “Please.”

“You remained committed to deceiving me, whatever your intentions. I responded accordingly.”

Will blinks, eyes widening, voice raising beyond his control, enough that the polite discourse of wine is left far behind. “You could have left. I warned you, before they arrived. You were ready to leave the night before and you could have gone. I would have -”

“I’m very curious what you would have done,” Hannibal intones, a dire amusement as he takes another sip and curls his lip a little, distaste for it.

“I would have found you,” Will answers softly. “I would have come.”

There is no more belief given to Will’s words than Will to Hannibal’s offers, however removed now, of forgiveness. The same doubt that has always existed between them, who yielded so much to the other and yet never everything, not entirely. Both as selfish as the other. Both as in need of the understanding only the other can provide, and yet has never fully given.

“You’ve found me,” Hannibal responds, finishing his glass. “And I wonder what you intend to do, now that you have.”

Drawn together and bound, inseparable, and unable to sheathe their claws for long enough to stop from drawing blood - then and now and always, Will recognizes now. They were never Achilles and Patroclus, no matter how desperately they wished to be, and behind his eyes, rubbed slow again, Will sees himself instead as Tyr, hand held between the jaws of the bound wolf Fenriz, ravenous in all things.

“I wonder too,” Will admits. “But my mistake was reparable. Yours was not.”

“You will not forgive me.”

“No,” Will answers. “Nor will you, me.”

“No,” agrees Hannibal softly. “And so we are, as ever, at a standstill, until one of us makes another move.”

The man moves to stand, and Will watches him do so. Takes in the whole of him, striking and elegant, refinement given form that lies only across the surface of a cruel decay. Scars less obvious than those that Will carries, but no less a reminder of what might have been, in the home that he has tried to make for himself here.

A home that might once have been far warmer than it is now, as Will stands and returns his glass to Hannibal. Their fingers do not graze, and Will is grateful for it.

“The next time we see each other -” Will begins, stepping onto the porch.

Hannibal hums a gentle acknowledgement of the words unsaid, and extends the coat to Will. Still stained with blood from hearts that once were full and now are emptied, another tie severed between them.

“You will try to take this all from me,” he finally says. “I will try to stop you. The next time we meet, I’m afraid it will be the last,” Hannibal speaks, clear and calm, and Will wonders as he always has at the man’s ability to still his heart so entirely.

“I’m afraid of that as well,” admits Will, a pale smile for dark humor that Hannibal returns, just as gently.

Will doesn’t shy away - as he didn’t a year before, as he never has - from the soft touch that Hannibal places against his cheek. The room is cold, the house encased in ice, and Will shivers as their mouths meet, and no warmth passes between them.

“Goodbye, Will.”

He turns his cheek against Hannibal’s palm as it falls away to push closed the door, and Will is immersed alone in the humid Mediterranean night once more.

“Goodbye, doctor.”


End file.
